My next ride was longer, and anything but cool. In fact, if I had known how much I’d be sweating by the time it was over I never would have gotten in the car. The lights of Tallahassee were winking on for the night when a beat-up Ford Fairlane trailing sparks from a dragging tailpipe came scraping down the ramp and pulled over on the shoulder beside me. The back door swung open and a Southern voice called out, ‘Room for one more. Come on, if you’re coming!’ What am I getting myself into? I wondered, but I was tired of waiting on the ramp, so I grabbed my stuff and jumped into the back seat beside a blond teenager with a scared-rabbit look in his eyes.
‘That there’s Kalvin,’ said the driver, twisting around in his seat to introduce me to the scrawny teenager. ‘Picked him up a few miles back. I’m Virgil and this here peckerhead’s my brother, Sammy,’ he said, nodding at the other middle-aged redneck in the front seat. ‘What’s your name, hoss?’ When I told him, he said, ‘Well, Pete, we can take you far as the Alford turn-off. Then we’re headin’ north to Alabama. Sammy, pass that bottle. Let ol’ Pete get a nip for the road.’
Brother Sammy swung around and shoved a pint of Wild Turkey at me, but I smiled and waved him off. ‘Shoot yourself,’ he grinned. ‘More for me and Virgil.’ Not that the two of them needed it, I thought to myself. The inside of the Fairlane smelled like the business end of a moonshine still. Kalvin’s jittery look was starting to make sense. And it wasn’t long before I was wearing that same look myself.
Virgil stomped on the gas, and the Fairlane fishtailed off the shoulder in a clatter of gravel. We shot out onto the highway, with the crazy redneck steering one-handed and the tailpipe spraying sparks like a grinding wheel. ‘Make yourself useful, Sammy,’ Virgil barked, once we were up to speed. ‘Find us some Reba on the radio. Ain’t a party without Reba. And don’t be hogging that Turkey, you peckerhead. Give it here,’ he said, letting go of the wheel with his steering hand to snatch the bottle from his brother’s grasp.
With growing alarm, I wondered what kind of show-off game the fool was playing, as Virgil took a long pull from the bottle and let the Fairlane drift rudderless across two lanes of traffic. Why the hell wasn’t he steering with his other hand? That’s when fear sharpened my focus and I belatedly noticed the pinned-up left sleeve of Virgil’s khaki fatigue jacket. I couldn’t believe it – we were crossing the Panhandle in the dark with a one-armed drunk at the wheel. Could this ride get any crazier?
I glanced to my left to see how Kalvin was taking it. The poor kid looked ready to jump out of the car on the fly. I nudged him with my elbow and whispered, ‘Hang tough, Kalvin. We’ll get through this.’
‘In how many pieces, you think?’ Kalvin whispered back. Gallows humour. I liked it. The kid had more pluck than I thought. Which was a good thing, because the eighty-mile ride to Alford was a hair-raising test of nerve for both of us. Amazingly, we made it through alive. Don’t ask me how. Only the angels can answer that one. All I know is, the kid and I were wrung out by the time we scrambled out of the Fairlane at the Alford exit and we both agreed to bed down for the night rather than push on in the dark.
While we were scouting around for a campsite in a clover field beside the road, a cold drizzle began falling and the only shelter available was the overpass bridge, so we climbed the steep embankment and lay down head-to-head on the wide concrete ledge beneath the roadway support beams. I nodded out for an hour or so before waking to take a piss, and when I opened my eyes I saw Kalvin sitting up wide awake beside me, hugging himself and shivering with cold. The night air had gotten much cooler after the rain and the kid’s flannel lumberjack shirt wasn’t cutting it.
‘Why didn’t you wake me up and tell me you were freezing?’ I scolded him. He said he’d been scared to bother me. ‘Don’t be a dummy,’ I said, stripping off my overcoat. ‘Here, put this over you,’ I told him, and when I got back we lay down beside each other beneath my coat. Eventually his teeth stopped chattering and he drifted off. But we’d only managed a couple hours’ sleep before the probing beam of a cop’s spotlight hit me full in the face and woke me up.
‘YOU THERE, UNDER THE BRIDGE, COME DOWN WITH YOUR HANDS UP!’ the bullhorn voice commanded.
Kalvin woke up muttering and asked what was going on. ‘The cops want a word with us,’ I whispered. ‘We better get down there.’
Squinting into the bright light, we started down the steep slope, but neither of us could keep our footing on the embankment’s rain-slick paving stones and ended up sliding halfway down the slope on our asses. Which might have been comical if our pratfalls hadn’t landed us at the feet of an Army MP and a county sheriff who were out hunting an escaped military prisoner.
‘Either of these two your man?’ the local cop asked the MP, but the army cop shook his head. ‘What are you guys doing under the bridge?’ the sheriff asked. We told him we were holing up till daylight before thumbing west to Louisiana. He must have found our tandem tumbling act amusing, because instead of hassling us any further he and the MP just climbed back in their cruisers and drove off to resume their manhunt.
‘We got lucky,’ Kalvin exhaled.
‘Tell that to my tailbone,’ I moaned, brushing dirt off the seat of my pants. But both of us were laughing as we picked our way cautiously back up the slope and settled in to sleep off the last few hours before first light. At dawn, we climbed back up to the interstate and in the light of day it was plain to see that the redneck juicers had dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. We set off hiking along the highway toward a town called Chipley, ten miles down the line. We kept wagging our thumbs whenever a car came along, but nobody would stop and we wound up walking the entire ten-mile stretch. It took us more than two hours, our feet burning by the time we limped into Chipley.
‘Nothing like a ten-mile hike to get the blood pumping, right, Kalvin?’ I quipped as we neared the finish line.
‘Least I’m not freezing any more,’ he grinned, wiping sweat from his eyes. The morning had warmed up nicely while we were pounding pavement. At the Chipley exit there was a dinky tin-roofed general store with a single Sinclair pump out front. ‘Race you there,’ Kalvin challenged. ‘Loser buys breakfast.’
‘Find another sucker, kid,’ I laughed. ‘I’m beat.’
‘Just kidding,’ he smiled. ‘I’m beat, too. And I’m not even an old man like you.’
We decided to pool our money before we went into the store. Kalvin had a little cash he’d panhandled on the trip north from Miami, and I still had a few dollars left from the Toronado kid’s handout. Between us, we came up with six bucks, and we blew it all on a dozen powdered doughnuts, a half-gallon of milk and a couple of pouches of rolling tobacco. Then we took our sack of groceries down the road to a piney woodlot and hunkered beneath the trees. After we’d eaten, we tugged off our shoes and socks off to give our blistered feet an airing, and lolled around smoking and ‘taking our ease’, like Tom and Huck on their raft, until we finally felt rested enough to head back to the highway.
As we passed the general store again, Kalvin said, ‘Hold up a minute,’ and ran over to the dumpster in the parking lot. He fished out a cardboard box, tore off one of its sides and ran back to join me. ‘Thought we might do better hitching with a sign,’ he explained.
‘Worth a shot,’ I said. ‘But all I’ve got to write with is a ballpoint. We’d need a Magic Marker to make a decent sign.’
‘You mean one of these?’ Kalvin asked, smiling slyly as he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a brand-new marker, still in its blister-pack.
‘Where’d that come from?’ I asked, though I had a feeling I already knew the answer.
‘Five-finger discount. I snatched it while the cashier was ringing you up,’ he confessed.
‘Jesus, Kalvin, you’re quite the little klepto, aren’t you?’
‘Guess so,’ he shrugged, unabashed. ‘But my handwriting sucks, so you’d better make the sign. Besides, I’m not sure I can spell Pensacola.’
A few minu
tes later our new sign paid off when an elderly British couple out taking the air in their Jaguar convertible stopped to give us a lift. The two diminutive Brits were wearing identical Union Jack sports car caps, looking jaunty as all get out. Cast them in porcelain, bore a few holes in their heads and they’d have made a charmingly goofy set of salt and pepper shakers.
‘May we offer you a ride to Bonifay?’ the wife said brightly, in her BBC accent. ‘It’s only the next town, I’m afraid, but you’re welcome to join us.’
She didn’t have to ask us twice. Not with our feet still smarting from the long hike to Chipley. So we rode in style to Bonifay, ten breezy miles down the road, and put our sign to work again, but the sign seemed to have lost its mojo. Two frustrating hours later we were still stuck in Bonifay.
Finally Kalvin said, ‘Give me that sign, Pete. Let me try something.’
What’s the kid up to now? I wondered, as he pulled the Magic Marker from his pocket and embellished the sign with two thick Christian crosses, bold enough to be spotted from a long way off.
‘What are we going for here, Kalvin?’ I asked. ‘Divine intervention?’
‘A trick this dude in Miami taught me,’ Kalvin explained. ‘He said when you’re in Baptist country always put a cross on your sign. I should’ve thought of it hours ago. You watch, we’ll catch a ride in no time now.’
Damned if the kid wasn’t right. We caught four rides in a row after that and by late afternoon we were rolling into Pensacola, where I flipped our cardboard sign over and block-printed ‘MOBILE’ on the blank side, adding a couple of Baptist-bait crosses for good measure. In short order, we were on our way to Alabama in a Chevy Malibu with a thirty-something hipster at the wheel. Kalvin jumped in the back seat. I rode shotgun with Richie, a cool dude who welcomed us aboard with two icy-cold Bud tallboys he pulled from a Styrofoam cooler on the seat beside him.
‘Thanks,’ I said, popping the flip tab. ‘Glad we didn’t miss Happy Hour.’
Richie said I sounded like I was from New York, and when I confirmed his hunch he said, ‘Me, too. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Mobile’s my wife’s hometown. I moved down here ten years ago and opened a Brooklyn-style pizzeria. Taught the locals what a real pie tastes like. Now they stand in line half an hour just to get in the door.’
‘I can believe it,’ I said. ‘But do you ever miss New York?’
‘Yeah, sometimes. I miss the jazz clubs, mostly. You like jazz, Pete?’
I admitted I did and told him I’d been haunting the Village jazz clubs for years. The Blue Note. The Village Vanguard. Sweet Basil. The Cookery.
‘Yes, yes, check, yes, been to them all,’ Richie said excitedly. ‘You’re going to love this then,’ he said, popping a tape into the deck – and suddenly two duelling saxophones were blowing the roof off the Malibu.
‘Rahsaan Roland Kirk! Playing both saxophones!’ Richie shouted. ‘Recognise it?’
‘Hell, yeah,’ I shouted back. ‘This is “Bright Star”. A classic. I saw him do this at the Vanguard back in ’73. When he started playing two saxophones at the same time, my jaw dropped. I’ll never forget it!’
As it happened, the night I caught Kirk’s performance was also the night I first tried cocaine. Hearing Rahsaan’s sax brought it all back like it was yesterday. The first set was winding down when my pal Liam, the bartender, gave me the nod to follow him into the club’s back storeroom. I thought he was inviting me to share a joint, as we often did when he was working, but he surprised me by pulling out a vial of white powder instead.
‘Is that coke?’ I asked. When I admitted I’d never tried any, Liam looked at me like I had a hole in my head.
‘You’re shitting me, right? Where you been, Hat?’
‘Missing out, I guess,’ I grinned. What the hell, why not?
I trusted Liam. We’d been born only hours apart on the same February day in 1949 – a weird coincidence we didn’t discover until months after we first met at the Lion’s Head. Our shared birthday made me consider him my cosmic twin. However, unlike my tragically unhip childhood in the Long Island suburbs, Liam’s youth had been spent on the cobblestone streets of Greenwich Village. When it came to being cool, he was always a city block ahead of me – so, naturally, I didn’t think twice when he passed me the vial. If it’s good enough for Liam, it’s good enough for me, I thought. Which was exactly the kind of follow-the-leader thinking my father used to mock whenever I tried to excuse some bonehead move I’d pulled by claiming all my friends had done the same. ‘If your friends jumped off the Empire State Building, would you jump too?’ The answer, apparently, was yes – though I naively considered it a leap of faith, not a plunge into self-destruction. Events would prove otherwise, of course, but at the time I was hopelessly in thrall to the ‘anything goes’ mystique of Greenwich Village. And had been for years – ever since I’d made my first pilgrimage to the Lion’s Head in 1970, while I was home on summer break before my senior year at college.
Back then I’d been hoping to meet my idol-of-the-moment, the writer Fred Exley, whose debut novel A Fan’s Notes had blown me away with its harrowing but hysterical portrait of an alcoholic writer facing up to the fact that he’d been fated to watch from the sidelines while others – like his college classmate (and star football player) Frank Gifford – cashed in on the American Dream. A Fan’s Notes had been billed as a ‘fictional memoir’, but there was no mistaking its basis in boozy reality. I’d been awestruck by Exley’s gift for turning the disasters of his life into stories that were simultaneously sad and side-splittingly funny. Reading his novel was like making the Stations of the Cross high on nitrous oxide, and when I finished it I knew I’d found the newest member of my pantheon of hard-drinking writers – a worthy companion to Ernest Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Charles Bukowski and, of course, Jack Kerouac.
I had no idea back then why these dipsomaniacs appealed to me so much, but in retrospect I’d say it was their lack of self-control that I found alluring. All of them were writers I’d discovered only after puberty had given me good reason to doubt my own capacity for self-control, so I suppose at some unconscious level I recognised them as fellow slaves to habit, whose books offered proof that you could struggle with your demons and still turn out masterful work. But by romanticising their excesses, I suckered myself into believing I could do the same myself, and no doubt that delusion was as much to blame as my drunken condition when I accepted Liam’s invitation and took the nosedive that would alter my life in ways Harold Bloom surely never envisioned when he coined the phrase ‘the anxiety of influence’.
Rahsaan was still blowing strong as we crossed the causeway bridge over Mobile Bay at rush hour and were treated to a Gulf Coast sunset as gaudy as one of Kirk’s tie-dyed dashikis. Minutes later, Brooklyn Richie dropped us off at a busy cloverleaf intersection and, as I was bailing out, he did us one more solid by pressing a bag of Cheetos into my hands. Now we had supper.
‘Richie, you’re the best,’ I told him, and gave the Malibu’s roof a grateful thump as he pulled away.
‘Well, Kalvin, what do you think?’ I asked. ‘Should we find someplace to camp?’ We’d been on the road twelve hours already and it was quickly getting dark.
‘Sounds good to me,’ Kalvin said. ‘That beer made me sleepy. Guess I’m not much of a drinker.’
‘Count your blessings, kid,’ I grinned. ‘Let’s call it a night.’
CHAPTER 5
Hitchhiking across Mississippi was harder than parsing a William Faulkner sentence, despite Kalvin’s best efforts with his Magic Marker. He added so many extra crosses to our cardboard sign it began to resemble a child’s sketch of a battlefield cemetery, yet we still had little luck attracting Samaritans brave enough to take on two hitchhikers at once. No doubt we’d have made better time by splitting up, but I’d told Kalvin I’d stick with him till we reached his home state of Louisiana, and I didn’t want to go back on my word. The poor kid had already faced enough disappointment in his short life.
Kalvin had lost his mother to cancer a few weeks before I met him, and after his mom’s funeral he’d dropped out of high school and hitchhiked to Florida, hoping to reconnect with his father, who’d abandoned his wife and only child when Kalvin was still in grade school. When he got to Miami and discovered his father no longer lived at his old address, Kalvin was forced to fend for himself. With no money and no place to stay, he wound up sleeping in city parks and shoplifting candy bars to feed himself while he continued his search. Then, after four days of nosing around, he finally met a junkie who knew his father and suggested Kalvin check the local homeless shelter.
Kalvin said he hardly recognised the old man when he found him. His heroin habit had taken a toll and he looked nothing like the photos in the family album any more. Still, his dad seemed glad to see him – at first, anyway. But then he asked Kalvin for money to buy drugs, and when Kalvin admitted he was broke his father cursed him and told him he was the same worthless kid he’d always been. I’d have cracked the heartless bastard in the mouth, but Kalvin just fled the shelter before his old man had a chance to call him a crybaby too.
Now Kalvin was heading home to Winsboro, Louisiana, to stay with his mom’s widowed sister, and I figured the least I could do was keep him company till we got to New Orleans. Zeke’s talk about the brotherhood of the road must have stuck with me. You give when you can, and take when you can’t. I had nothing to offer Kalvin except camaraderie, but that seemed to be all he was looking for, and I could understand why. After Kate died, I’d relied on my friends at the Raccoon Lodge to lift my spirits. Poor Kalvin had had no one to confide in until I came along, and I could tell how relieved he was to share his story when we made camp in Mobile. Of course, Kalvin claimed it was the thick smoke from our greenwood campfire that made his eyes water, but I knew better, and my heart went out to him, like it had to Charlene back in Richmond. Which left me wondering if that wasn’t why the road had brought us together. To remind me again that I still had a heart. A heart willing to reconnect with the world, if only I had the sense to let it.
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